Life Down on the Democrat Plantation – Part II of II

Life Down on the Democrat Plantation – Part I of II

As already said, but it bears repeating, engineered poverty is nothing new – it’s right out of the old Marxist playbook: the Democrats have “minorities” while the Marxists had the “proletariat.” The Democrats have “White privilege” and “Wall Street,” while the Marxists had the “Capitalists” and “Bourgeoisie” (who were likewise characterized as “privileged”). The business model of the Democrats-Marxists can’t countenance free-market Capitalism and the upwardly mobile middle-class that it engenders, for without a working majority (electoral majority) of minorities / proletariat, their agenda fails. The Democrat-Marxist business model requires producing and increasing the supply of the “oppressed.”

THE DEMOCRATS’ POST-ANTEBELLUM ANTIFA – the White League and KKK. Street-thug enforcers. From Wikipedia: The White League, also known as the White Man’s League, was an American white paramilitary organization started in 1874 to turn Republicans out of office and intimidate freedmen from voting and political organizing. Affiliated with the Democratic Party, its first chapter was formed in Grant Parish, Louisiana and neighboring parishes, made up of many of the Confederate veterans who had participated in the Colfax massacre in April 1873. Chapters were soon founded in New Orleans and other areas of the state.

The plantation owners of the old South kept their slaves illiterate, while providing their most basic needs – food and shelter – just enough that they would keep working and keep reproducing. A dynamic not unlike today’s union-run urban schools producing functional illiterates; Section 8 / public housing and EBT cards. Instead of “stick” bullwhips, today we have “carrot” welfare.

Blacks are given a subsistence existence, and are expected to bring home the cotton votes, and to keep producing new generations of Dependency Class voters. Here mention must be made of three documentaries that provide insightful glimpses into life of the Democrat Plantation: “Waiting for Superman”  and “Runaway Slave”  being directly on point, and “There’s No Place Like Utopia” (though somewhat broader in scope, its coverage of Detroit and Newark alone earns it inclusion here).

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Indeed!

Of course the Democrats won’t admit to this; the Democrats claim that they “are fighting” to lift people up. Such was the promise made with the enactment over fifty years ago (under the LBJ administration) of the “Great Society” and “War on Poverty” programs – programs that have only (exponentially) expanded since. Yet while poverty rates were declining before those enactments, since then they’ve leveled off. Note that on the chart below poverty rates were rapidly declining, breaking below fifteen percent around 1965 – about the time of the “Great Society” enactments – and then within a couple of years of the “Great Society” started to (essentially) flat-line within a range of about eleven to fifteen percent. Note too that there are now millions more “living in poverty” than when the “Great Society” started.

In the 1950’s and early 1960’s de jure discrimination was finally eliminated; its legacy effects were (attempted) to be addressed (and redressed) through the enactment of the “Great Society” / “War on Poverty” programs and through de facto reverse discrimination through “diversity” nee “affirmative action” preferences given to non-Whites by academia, government and corporate America. The decades wore on, a Black President was elected, and it became increasingly awkward trying to logically explain-away the static Black underclass and the continuing “need” for the welfare state and diversity-affirmative action.

Thus, “White Privilege” was manufactured (recall that this term did not come into general usage until the Obama administration). Derivative of that came the pretense of “implicit bias,” i.e., that White people are all (or almost all) unconsciously, and so inherently biased (thus we also started getting the “check your privilege” conditioning on college campuses). “White privilege” and its accompanying baggage is a convenient concept for Progressives, because it cannot be objectively measured either as to “baseline” or “progress,” and so is perpetual. The “privilege” / “implicit bias” memes, distributed with the help of a complicit media, provides rationalizing boob bait for “useful idiots” – “useful” both for inciting “useful idiots” into believing, and for diverting attention from, and explaining away, the Great Society’s succeeding only in halting the decline in poverty rates that had been occurring beforehand (see chart below).

What would poverty rates be today if the pre-Great Society trend-line had held? Much lower, perhaps next-to-nothing.

Certainly it would have been unrealistic to expect those programs to have produced success in their early years. But just as certainly one should expect substantial success after a half-century! One would expect, if the Democrats were true to their word, that they’d be the first to decry this failure and be pursuing other remedies that might prove effective. But no, they reflexively double-down seeking expansion and more funding for the status quo.  So one must surmise that the Democrats are pleased with the results thus far, and want more of the same.

In what should be unbelievable, but is not because we’re living it, the Democrats have managed to convince a solid majority of today’s plantation dwellers that they’re helpless without the Democrats, and that the Democrats are not just their friends, but their advocates, protectors and, ultimately, their saviors! Thus we get cadres of “useful idiots” demonstrating under the BLM banner, and millions of poor, undereducated souls who been propagandized to believe that their only hope to lift themselves out of poverty is to vote for their Democrat oppressors. Aiding that evil misrepresentation are today’s successors to the “house Negroes” of lore – Black “civil rights leaders” and politicians who live high by helping the Democrats maintain the pretense, by providing a “blackface” to it.

THE “CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS.” From the Wikipedia entry on “House Negroes”: African-American activist Malcolm X commented on the cultural connotations and consequences of the term in his 1963 speech “Message to the Grass Roots”, wherein he explained that during slavery there were two types of slaves: “house Negroes” who worked in the master’s house, and “field Negroes” who performed outdoor manual labor. He characterized the house Negro as having a better life than the field Negro, and thus being unwilling to leave the plantation and potentially more likely to support existing power structures that favored whites over blacks.

The Democrats and their allies undermine and demoralize the very people they claim to help – but they cannot plead ignorance of problem or their root causes, nor plead unavailability of solutions. Root causes and solutions have been known for decades.

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.

There is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future – that community asks for and gets chaos.

– Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Decades ago, the late Senator (and scholar) Daniel Patrick Moynihan cited the breakdown of the family, precipitated by the perverse incentives of the “Great Society” as the catalyst for increases in Black poverty. Amazingly, Senator Moynihan was a New York Democrat (!), albeit of the old school – he would be shunned, if not expelled, from today’s Democrat Party (the radical Leftists have succeeded in purging the Democrat Party of moderates  – today there is no Truman or JFK or Moynihan to be found within its ranks).

The Progressives of Hollywood and the music industry peddle a false narrative of the authentic “Black culture” being “the hood” and crime and drugs and victimhood, when actually that sort of culture is a classic type of dysfunctional underclass culture that has burdened mankind (of all races) for millennia. Query too: was this the “Black culture” that existed since the Civil War, or is it a more recent phenomenon of, say, the post-Great Society era? As a consequence of this “Black culture,” far too many gullible youth, particularly males without positive role models in their lives, absorb this and are inculcated with the idea that Black masculinity entails not education and a work ethic and achievement, but “ho’s” and spreading their seed among as many of them as they can – that, and gangs. Meanwhile, the girls, who could be a positive influence and demand more of the men in their lives, are conditioned to believe that pumping out illegitimate babies, early and often, is both acceptable and viable (since the Great Society programs will fund it all).  Through the Great Society, the Democrats have succeeded in erecting a sort of cultural apartheid in the United States of America.

This glamorizing of “Black culture” is not just craven Hollywood executives peddling whatever will make a buck, for it also reflects a general attitude amongst Progressives of what “Black culture” not only is, but should be. Whenever non-Progressives decry the rising illegitimacy rate – much less propose program reforms to dis-incentivize it – the Progressives in academia, politics and the media go nuts. This even though studies show that the single greatest contributor to, and predictor of poverty is single-parenthood, i.e., illegitimacy. So too do the Progressive usual suspects go nuts when “workfare” is proposed to help build and promote a work ethic. In August 2017 two (brave!) university professors – Amy Wax from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego Law School – wrote an Op-Ed (“Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture”) – calling for the return of a cultural embrace of 1950’s like “bourgeois” values. You know, things like completing an education, getting married in a committed relationship, then having children, and working hard to achieve upward mobility. On cue, Progressives reflexively denounced this piece, including labeling it as promoting “White culture” or “White privilege.”

(Let us somewhat digress for a moment.) Which begs the question for our self-ordained enlightened Progressive betters: If such traits that are proven to promote strong families, healthy in mind and spirit future generations, and economic upward mobility are a matter of culture (in this case “White culture”or “bourgeois culture”); and

Under your lauded “multiculturalism” other “cultures” are to remain bound within their own pre-existing strictures, and not mix-and-match (shall we say) “cultural best practices” – what you might derisively refer to as “reverse cultural appropriation” – as that would “dilute” the genuine culture of that group; and

As what you portray as authentic “Black culture” (or “Hispanic culture”) involves low educational aspirations, illegitimacy and static mobility (government dependency), and those are being realized on a widespread basis; then

Does not the higher poverty rate amongst Blacks and Hispanics signal that America has achieved the multi-cultural state that you say you want, and claim is our societal lodestar?   Is not rising wealth inequality evidence that we’re becoming more multi-cultural?

Just askin’  (End of digression.)

Outside of family life, educational attainment is the single greatest enabler of future upward mobility. Yet the Democrats fight tooth-and-nail to prevent Black children from having school choice, and to prevent school choice creating competition that would force the unionized public schools to improve or die. A national scandal is our urban schools pumping out – “graduating” – millions of functional illiterates who are thus doomed to a fate of a low standard of living and no prospect of rising out of it.  At the same time, the Progressive entertainment media and academia peddles a message of hopelessness and insurmountable victimhood (e.g., “White Privilege”); that “authentic” “Black culture” eschews educational ambition as “acting White.” In this they’re taking young Black children, who are too young to know any better, and deliberately engineering them into the Dependency Class.

In many senses – while they will vehemently deny it – the Progressives act more consistently with the premise that Blacks (and Hispanics) are inferior, incapable of grasping or adhering to the same rigors or standards of other people than they do with the principle that “all men are created equal” and so can and should be held to equal standards and, on average, can and should achieve equal prosperity. The Progressives’ actions speak louder than their words, and again, in this form of prejudice they are not unlike their Antebellum plantation-master predecessors.

Certainly there are “useful idiots” within the Progressive orbit, who sincerely believe that all men are created equal, and have (gullibly) swallowed the victimhood mantras about “legacy of slavery” and “White privilege” and “implicit bias” and so on. Or are just Marxist-inclined, and so believe that our whole economic system is exploitive, and that Black have it worse due to the legacies mentioned above. The “useful idiots” largely mean well, but are fundamentally and severely misguided (and with each passing year, much less decade, such ignorance becomes less and less excusable – eventually reality has to intrude, and it is not unreasonable for us to expect such folks to “wake up and smell the coffee”). But the more astute of the Progressives know better, and know “cause and effect” and solutions that would fulfill the dream that the “Great Society” was supposed to fulfill. They want power and wealth, leveraging those on the way to their long-sought revolution “fundamental transformation,” and for them the “idiots” are “useful” – just as perpetuating poverty and dysfunctional and counter-productive morays, and dysfunctional and counter-productive government programs, is “useful.”

Today’s Democrat Party remains in power by treating the symptoms of Black poverty – through the myriad welfare programs – while vehemently promoting and protecting the root causes of that poverty, thus perpetuating it.  In so doing it has exploited poor Blacks that the Democrats (and Progressives generally) are their protectors and benefactors, even as the Democrats (and Progressives generally) are the reason that they are in the situation they’re in – as will their children and following generations, if the Democrats have their way.

There was a shared dream on the part of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. – directly descended from our Declaration of Independence – of a society-wide recognition and practice of the principle that: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  That principle is one of the reasons this nation is divinely inspired.  Yet that dream has not been fully achieved, much less enjoyed by Blacks in America.  But the obstacle(s) holding back the final, blessed consummation of that dream is not “White privilege” or “implicit bias” or “income inequality.”  No, it is the Democrat Party specifically, and Progressivism generally.

While it is not for us to judge, or to know, it seems a fair estimation that those Antebellum plantation-masters’ eternal souls now reside in (shall we say) the warmest of climates. This writer submits to you that it also seems a fair estimation that our modern Progressives-Democrats, pursuing electoral power and its resultant wealth, leveraging those to pursue their revolution – by exploiting millions of Blacks, today in far greater number than there were slaves during the 1800’s – will likewise find their eternal souls residing in the warmest of climates.  That would be social justice.